The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock

(boat.horse)

39 points | by ohjeez 1 day ago

6 comments

  • unholiness 12 minutes ago
    I love the fractal nature of this, where the big shape of one two three four... is then roughly repeated both on a slower scale (twenty thirty forty...) and on a narrower scale (twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four...).

    I'm now wondering the hausdorf dimension of the graph of alphabetical numbers <n, and how other languages might compare.

  • gorgoiler 2 hours ago
    What a ridiculous idea. As hard to read as it is dumb!

    For a senior engineer like myself with decades of experience it is trivial to see how to fix this to make it much more readable.

    1/ pick a sunny day

    2/ at each hour, measure the bearing to the sun

    3/ encode as a dict[str, float] e.g.

        {“twelve”:180.00}
    
    4/ sort the hours by dict.get

    Voila.

    As an added bonus, for some reason this ends up sorting the minutes and seconds too. (“# wtf?!”)

    For now, I was only able to fix the hours when I could see the sun (eleven, twelve, and two to eight — I don’t get up very early and I like lunch). Patches form the arctic circle welcome :P

    I also need to tilt my head a bit as eleven is at the top instead of twelve. Other than that I would say it’s a considerable improvement on the OP’s rather naïve implementation! Scoff!

    • eru 2 hours ago
      Here in Singapore on many sunny days, the bearing is largely the same hour after hour. The sun just changes apparent altitude.
      • fellerts 2 hours ago
        Jam a stick in the ground aligned with the earth's axis and take your bearing from the shadow's direction. Then follow GP's instructions. Never mind that we've reinvented the sundial...
  • gnabgib 1 day ago
    As a Show HN (40 points, 15 days ago, 27 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47571401
  • throwway262515 1 hour ago
    Syntax is wildly continuous with semantics, what’s the problem?
  • alfanick 2 hours ago
    Imagine the mechanical gears behind this if it was an analogue watch. So many funky curved gears in there.
  • mnvsbl 3 hours ago
    [dead]